Islam, which according to a 2006 Statistics Canada poll is the fastest growing religion in the country, is associated, quite often by our youth, with oppression, terrorism and barbarism.
I would imagine an eighteen year old saying that an Islamic country is a patriarchal, oppressive towards women and conservative country. He or she wouldn’t be far off in their assessment, since most Middle Eastern and North African countries are in fact just like that.
I’ve never myself been to any such country, so my perception of say Saudi Arabia , Yemen , Afghanistan or Somalia
Now I’m not so thick headed or hateful as to assume that all Muslims are extremists or prone to terrorism, just because of whom they are and what they follow. We know for a fact that even non-Muslims are just as vulnerable to become radical as the mild or strict adherents of the religion.
Also we cannot say that Christianity or Hinduism are somehow superior to Islam in the sense that they are less prone to compel its adherents to commit acts of violence or even perhaps terrorism.
You back a religious person of any denomination into a corner or threaten their beliefs in any existential way and see how civil they’ll remain.
I would submit that all religions are, because of their supposedly unchangeable tenets of faith, extremist in some way or another. They propose something improvable to be true and they defend such irrational and quixotic thinking with incredible zeal. How is that not an extremist stance?
I think the insecurity religious people feel, and especially Muslims, as evidenced by their constant cries for societal protection and complaints about discrimination, shows the nature of their hypocrisy.
It is that most can’t admit that they are wrong! They can’t say things like: Well you know some things in the Qur’an are self evidently not true. Because those kinds of confessions would undermine the credibility of their religion and thus their identity.
Why their identity?
Out of personal experience, most Canadian Muslims I know almost always identity themselves as Muslims first and Pakistani, Yemeni, Afghan or Iranian second. And most, when asked the critical question: If Canadian values and Islamic values were to ever contradict themselves, and I personally believe that they do, what allegiance do you hold first? Are you a Canadian first and a Muslim second, or is it the other way around?
I am an atheist, so I have the luxury to be able to say that I’m a Canadian first. I wasn’t raised an atheist, but nonetheless I don’t have to put up with such moral dilemmas.
This kind of question can be asked of any religious person and I believe it to be the proper starting point for an exercise through which one can determine whether or not someone holds extremist views.
There are other questions like:
Would you be willing to concede that in fact the Hadith, which has equal canonical authority in Islam as the Qur’an, has some very specific injunctions to discipline women? Injunctions that by western standards are considered rather excessive, violent and even unnecessary.
And would you recognize the fact that there are other religions out there that may hold similar truths as Islam? That they would be equally valid, taken in the proper context.
If the answer to these questions is no, I would think that the person is rather exclusivist and has a radical view of both their religion and of other religions.
And if the answer is yes, then they are not radical in their views, but in what sense are they religious? How is one still a Muslim when one concedes that Jesus, Mohammed and Hanuman were all correct?
See the existential dilemma?
Finally, I believe in understanding and learning about people’s differences first, before casting any judgement.
Unfortunately, my knowledge of Islam is fragmented at best, and thus maybe inherently biased. However, I’m not to be grouped with those oblivious as to what Islam stands for, what it’s about, its basic tenets and its history.
And I think that Islam’s worst enemy in Canada
